Using my forcefield hands to pinch metal together, curl ragged edges, and straighten what was bent, I simultaneously figured out the new limits of my forcefield. The reach of the arms, the number and position of them.

My forcefield had long hair. Longer than I was used to. Less arms, less legs. Like it was halfway between where my old forcefield had been and where ‘the Wretch’ had been.

Just gotta get my gun in good enough shape I can shoot if I need to. We might have to go after Titan Fortuna. If she’s anything like her old host, she can do anything perfectly, and get the ideal outcomes. Raises the question: what can she do about a beam that moves the speed of light, fired from the clouds?

I wasn’t being rhetorical, asking myself that. I was genuinely concerned.

But I didn’t have any better ideas.

The metal squealed as I adjusted it. I glanced back Sveta’s way, seeing motion and color out of the corner of my eye. Case Fifty-Threes, very close to her. Engel was among them. Again, that fucking explosion of mixed senses, more violent than it had been in the past, yet all pleasant, all jarring when I was sweating, smelling my own sweat damp from my own body, my mouth dry, my heart hammering.

I felt the forcefield’s hair slip over a bare forcefield shoulder.

⊙

“It’s not perfect.”

“It—” Hard to breathe right, to get sound to where I needed it, like I was sucking liquid in through a straw with a hole in it. “Doesn’t need to be perfect.”

Her hands cupped my face, fingers stroking my cheeks, light brown eyes searching, analytical, studying.

“You fixed the acid burns. I hate to say it, but—”

“You don’t hate to say it,” she said, eyes still looking at proportions, features, trying to measure. Her face took up ninety percent of my vision, the dilapidated house with the flooding damage on the first floor taking up the last ten percent. The place smelled like damp. Freckles took up what seemed like fifty percent of the real estate on her face. “I can feel your body, everything in it.”

“Invasive,” I said.

“You don’t feel invaded either,” she said. “Heart rate normal. You’re uncomfortable but not in a way that’s hurting you. You’re breathing normally. Serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin and dopamine are close to normal.”

“They can’t be,” I said. “You altered my feelings for you. I feel those feelings right now.”

“…Normal besides that.”

“That’s why I hate to say ‘thank you’.”

“You don’t hate it,” she repeated.

“Master protocols.”

“I don’t know what that means, but I’m sure it’s clever.”

“Master protocols are to handle emotional changes with logic. Hammer past logic warping with raw emotion. Don’t stop fighting, especially if it’s physical puppeteering.”

“You’re such a dork,” she said.